Even With The Best Of Intentions, Sometimes It Just Don't Work

I recently went shopping for a new color LaserJet, for one of my clients. The old office workhorse had finally died. It was slow, large, noisy and clunky, but had served them well.

So I began asking around. What came back was "try the new Xerox Phaser." So I took a look at the specs. I was impressed (and so, it seems, was the CRN Test Center). It was fast, relatively small in size, and priced just right.

Off went the purchase order, and back came the printer. Now, this client is typical in some respects, not in others. They run a very mixed shop: NT 4 and NT 2000 servers (without active directory), Windows 98 and Windows 2000 workstations. For software, they use a custom made graphic package (used for data basing the scanned images and printing) and Photoshop.

We got the Xerox working, and wow, it was fast, the results were sharp, the colors vivid, and that was from Word. Then we started to use our other software and well, sometimes things just don't work!

We couldn't get the pictures to print properly. From color gradations to size, they just didn't print correctly. We spent countless hours on-line with some top-notch technical support people at Xerox (and I mean top-notch). But, even with the best of intentions, sometimes things just don't work.I learned two important lessons here. First, Xerox provides great technical phone support. Second, sometimes it's very difficult to explain why some things just don't work.